Monday. I spent a couple of hours dancing the bureaucratic fandango with student loan lenders and the IU registrar trying to get a loan deferred. Fortunately for me, I’d mentally prepared myself, so I wasn’t frustrated overmuch by the runaround. Bureaucracies are institutionalized policies: they come into existence to fill a specific niche, but once they’re on their feet they sacrifice efficiency at dealing with individuals for being efficient at existing. John Gall noted as early as 1975 in Systemantics that systems tend to become ends in themselves. Gall’s book is worth tracking down and reading if you’re at all interested in why bureaucracies, departments, governments, and the like all seem to become more and more inefficient.
Take a man–let’s call him M–gets a job building widgets. He’s pretty good at it, so more people want widgets from him. In response, he hires a couple of assistant widget makers to make widget subassemblies. On the one hand, this is a clear improvement. They’re making more widgets than ever before, so they’re taking on new customers and keeping their existing customers well supplied with widgets. On the other hand, having two new widget makers causes a few problems. They aren’t as skilled at making widgets as M, so they widgets they make break down more often than the ones M makes. Worse, they’re making a lot of widgets, and even though the widget failure rate isn’t that high, they’ve sold so many widgets that the three of them have to deal with broken widgets on a pretty regular basis. They decide to hire a person to do widget technical support, and this seems to work okay. And since everything is going swimmingly, M decides to hire a couple more assistant widget makers, another widget tech support person, and an office assistant to take orders from customers, fill out paperwork, make the coffee, and do some limited payroll work. (M does the lion’s share of payroll, so he’s making fewer widgets now. He figures his four assistants can handle most of the real widget work, and besides, he’s thinking about hiring a couple more.)
Note what’s happened: whereas before we had one man taking orders and building widgets to the satisfaction of everybody, we now have half a dozen people devoted to the system of building so-so widgets and supporting them to frustrated customers. And M, the master widget maker, the man whose widgets drew in customers from far and wide, now spends most of his time signing checks and interviewing new personnel to hire. In short, the man who set out to do one thing–make widgets–now does a multitude of things with the goal of keeping alive the system of making widgets. Success and size carry their own penalties. It’s worth noting, for example, that biological cells generally don’t exceed a certain upper limit on size. Beyond that size it is too difficult for nutrients to diffuse throughout the cell and intracellular communication takes more effort.
When humans run into a barrier like this, it’s not uncommon to look to technology. Not enough rainwater to support a growing village? Dig a well. Ships having a hard time surviving battles against other ships? Coat them in metal. Narrow isthmus of land forcing you to sail around an entire continent? Dynamite out a channel and install locks to allow large ships to pass.(1) Technology is so good at solving problems–or at least things we think of as problems–that new technologies sometimes solve problems we aren’t even aware of yet. When the laser was first invented, it was called “a solution looking for a problem.”(2) Now, of course, you’d have to work pretty hard to avoid them; have fun not grocery shopping, using computers, or watching television. (And no, you can’t check a book out from the library, either.) The process of adapting a new technology to solve our problems is a familiar one.
What’s easy to overlook is Neil Postman’s (1998) observation that an application of new technology implies an exchange: you give up one way of doing things for another. (3) This “giving up” is inherent in the transaction, and there is no way around it. This does not mean that the exchange is never a good deal, but rather one must be aware what is being lost in the exchange as well as the anticipated gains. Postman continues:
Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape. Or you might reflect on the paradox of medical technology which brings wondrous cures but is, at the same time, a demonstrable cause of certain diseases and disabilities, and has played a significant role in reducing the diagnostic skills of physicians. It is also well to recall that for all of the intellectual and social benefits provided by the printing press, its costs were equally monumental. The printing press gave the Western world prose, but it made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of communication. It gave us inductive science, but it reduced religious sensibility to a form of fanciful superstition. Printing gave us the modern conception of nationhood, but in so doing turned patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion. We might even say that the printing of the Bible in vernacular languages introduced the impression that God was an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman–that is to say, printing reduced God to the dimensions of a local potentate.
Back to systems. If you’re willing to consider work systems a form of technology, then we can examine the case of M and his widgets to see what he has given up for greater an increase in size. In order to produce more widgets, he had to increase the size of his widget manufacturing group; however, each member of the team has to worry about meetings, training, interviews, and the like that have nothing to do directly with widget production. Furthermore, each widget isn’t quite as good as the original batch. M has gained something–production, and more importantly, customers–but he has given up a fair amount, too: widget making, pride of ownership over everything he makes, the freedom that comes from having no one’s future to risk except his own. Whether it was worth it is up to M; if he enjoys managing people as much as he enjoys making widgets, then he may have come out ahead.
For M’s sake, let’s hope M is happy with his choice.
(1) In the case of the Panama Canal, Theodore Roosevelt also had to encourage Panama to declare independence from Colombia by offering military support. Thus the Panama Canal is also a superb example of political technology in action as well.
(2) Townes, C.H. (2003) The first laser. In A century of nature: Twenty-one discoveries that changed science and the world. Garwain, L, and Lincoln, T., eds. U of Chicago P.
(3) Postman, N. (1998) Five things we need to know about technological change. Address to the New Tech ‘98 Conference. Available online here.
